Imaginary. It will recur, enhanced by explicit dialectical reasoning,
as the progressive-regressive method inSearch for a Methodand the
Critiqueover fifteen years later. The phenomenology employed here is
more Heideggerian than Husserlian in nature, for it relies heavily on
our pre-understanding that is then articulated by careful and apt inter-
pretative description. In other words, Sartre’s phenomenology inBN,
like Heidegger’s in BT,ishermeneutical. Another term for this pre-
understanding is “preontological comprehension.” Such preontological
comprehension is an unusually fecund source of primitive, infallible
awareness for Sartre. Thus inBNhe speaks of a preontological compre-
hension of being ( 17 ), of nonbeing ( 7 ), of the futility of sincerity ( 63 ), of
the criteria of truth ( 156 ), of the existence of the Other ( 251 ), of human
reality ( 561 ), of the human person ( 568 ), and of one’s fundamental project
( 570 ). I say “awareness” rather than “knowledge” because “knowledge” is
reflective whereas preontological comprehension turns out to be “prere-
flective.” In succeeding years, preontological comprehension had morphed
into comprehensionsens phrasein a way that not only assumes the function
of Diltheyan Verstehen (understanding) regarding social phenomena
but appropriates features of the Freudian unconscious which Sartre has
categorically rejected inBNand elsewhere.^31
Major theses and themesOthers have devoted book-length studies to this seminal work. Given the
constraints of capturing an intellectual biography in a single volume,
I have selected what I take to be several of the distinctive claims and their
consequences for the descriptive analysis of being that Sartre promises
in his subtitle for the work. Referring occasionally to their anticipation
in earlier writings such as theWar Diariesand their employment and
sometimes revision in later ones, I shall respect the headings that Sartre
gives to each of the four parts of his study in addition to the introduction
and the conclusion. It is not my intention to perform a “rational recon-
struction” of the argument of the book, though the “progress” of the
argument is not as linear as the layout of the chapters would suggest.
Rather, my intention is to underscore what is distinctively Sartrean in
(^31) See below,Chapter 11.
176 The war years, 1939–1944